12 or 20 questions: with Nadine McInnis

Nadine McInnis is the author of seven books, including the fiction collection, Quicksilver (Raincoast), which was nominated for the 2002 Danuta Gleed Award, The Writers Craft Award, and the Ottawa Book Award, as well as five poetry collections: Shaking the Dreamland Tree (Coteau), The Litmus Body (Quarry Books), which won the Ottawa Book Award and was short-listed for the Pat Lowther Award, Hand to Hand (Polestar), First Fire / Ce feu que dévore (Vermillon/Buschek Books),which was short-listed for the Ottawa Book Award and the Archibald Lampman Award, and Two Hemispheres (Brick Books, 2007). She’s also published Poetics of Desire (Turnstone), a critical study of the love poetry of Dorothy Livesay.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

When my first book was published, I had just left rural Saskatchewan. I was suffering from acute dislocation even though I had come home. I remember being very bothered by streetlights at night. And the book reflects my struggles with ghosts once again grown strong. Instead of driving a stake through the heart of the past, that book fed blood to the phantoms. I remember feeling very depleted. I never had that experience with any other book.

2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all,impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I’ve been back in Ottawa for twenty years. Landscape is essential to all my writing, but I respond strongly to different kinds of landscapes: peaceful ease on the prairies, uneasy awe to the Maritime seascape of all my ancestors, and with such complex feelings to the urban and geologic reality of central Canada that this must be my most significant landscape. The rivers here, the hills to the north of the city, the bog and green space, but also the urban landscape of parking lots and hospitals and suburbs, interest me a great deal.

My gender is one of the most important influences because I’ve always been interested in the experiences of the body: sexuality, fertility, illness, aspects of appetite.

3 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I don’t start with any idea for a book. The first half of what turns out to be a book is tentative. Once I see what I’m writing about, the ideas flow more coherently.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Public readings aren’t that important to my creative process, but it can be lovely to feel a connection with listeners. I’m a much more visual person than an auditory person and often find it difficult to follow at readings. I prefer to be alone with a book, yet I’ve discovered poets I didn’t know by going to readings. I guess this roundabout answer reflects my ambiguous feelings. I wish I loved readings more and could bask in the sense of shared experience. I also wish I could dance without inhibition. Readings are really performances, which is the opposite of the writing process, which is solitary.

5 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Editors are your best friend when they’re good at what they do. Editing takes incredible skill and generosity of spirit. Mostly, I’ve been lucky.

6 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

I trust the process more and let things unfold as they will so I guess it’s easier.

7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Today, because I read this question yesterday and the suggestive power of words is very potent.

8 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“This too shall pass,” which is the best reason for writing I’ve ever heard, and also the best response to suffering.

9 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Fiction and poetry seem to use different parts of the brain. Usually I write one or the other exclusively for a period of time. My desire to write fiction emerged in my thirties after a period of intense introspection when I was sick of myself. Fiction wasn’t about me, me, me and that was such a relief. At the same time, my poetry was becoming more out-turned, taking on some of the qualities of fiction. I particularly like dialogue and found the interaction between characters engaging. But I had to learn and unlearn writing habits to be able to move between poetry and fiction. Poets can rely more on certain flourishes of language. The reader is conscious of the poet throughout and can enjoy what the poet can do with language or with ideas. The pleasure of fiction often resides in the ability to forget the author is even there. I had to learn how to get out of the way.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write when I’m drawn to write and usually something is gathering momentum in the back of my mind for a while before I start actively throwing out the fishing line. Observing, musing, laughing at stories people tell you, letting your dreams and deeper sleep states do their mysterious work are all part of writing, so it’s hard to talk about a routine. In a way, those of us who write are always writing. Maybe this comes from having done so much writing in my head while I was pushing strollers. I remember these experiences as happy instead of frustrating, and my children have both grown into people who love to sit quietly and think as they move through time and space. They’ve been excellent travelers.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Playing the harp clears away cobwebs when I’m stuck. Wood vibrates against my shoulder in such an effortless way that I’m freed from words. Usually it’s best to walk away and leave a piece of writing alone, sometimes for years. Then what I was trying to write works itself out without the interference of my ego. Or not, in which case I can abandon it. One is drawn to explore experiences one doesn’t fully understand. That’s why the images are there, the atmosphere, the sense of something trying to pull together. If you’re lucky, the philosopher and craftsperson catch up. In the meantime, make music, or throw colour, or walk through a blizzard.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

Two Hemispheres is more direct and urgent. I was deeply moved by the photos of the women in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum and wanted to engage with them, to give them my full attention. Writing that book was an act of love, for them, for my troubled family members, for myself and my immediate family and all people who struggle with darkness. As all people do who are not psychopaths.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Nature is and has always been my element, my solace. Despite my Roman Catholic upbringing with its daily dogma and interminable ritual, I knew from my earliest age that I was a pagan.

14 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Be completely comfortable in my own skin.

15 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

My interest in people’s stories could have led me to being a therapist of some sort. But I also love trees and am quite happy alone so could have been a tree surgeon.

16 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

The great solace I found in books. A solace so intimate, it was like whispering under the covers. All is right in the world when I’m absorbed in a book.

17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I’ve been reading nonfiction lately. Two books come to mind: Heart of a Soldier by James Stewart, which traces the friendship of two men from their days serving in Viet Nam to September 11, 2001, when one of them dies in the World Trade Centre; and Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which follows the wayward travels of a young middle class man who eventually starves to death in an old school bus in the Alaskan wilderness. Both books are illuminating glimpses into male questing in the modern context.

The last wonderful movie was Away from Her, for the artistry, the acting and the Canadian landscape which is so absent from mainstream film.

18 - What are you currently working on?

I’m finishing up a collection of short fiction. Many of the stories are set in a hospice. I’m fascinated by that place between consciousness and unconsciousness, between being and not being.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Colin Morton

Colin Morton was born in Toronto after WWII, grew up in Calgary during the oil boom, attended U. of Calgary when W.O. Mitchell was writer-in-residence, and U. of Alberta in Edmonton when Tom Wayman was writer-in-residence. His M.A. thesis (U. of A., 1979) was a novel. Morton began publishing poems and stories in small new literary magazines in the 1970s, many of his early publications being visual or concrete poems that are still anthologized and are being republished in The Cabbage of Paradise (Seraphim Editions, 2007). His first book of poems, In Transit (Thistledown Press, 1981), was published the week Morton moved to Ottawa, where he was employed in the federal government for eleven years. Outside the 9 to 5, Morton published more books of poetry (This Won't Last Forever, Longspoon Press, 1985; The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems, Quarry Press, 1987; How to Be Born Again, Quarry, 1991) as well as publishing small literary editions under the Ouroboros imprint, performing cross-media poetry and music with the First Draft group and in the animated film Primiti Too Taa, and writing more novels for his drawer. Since leaving the public service in 1993, Morton has published one of those novels (Oceans Apart, Quarry, 1995) and more poetry (Coastlines of the Archipelago, Buschekbooks, 2000; Dance, Misery, Seraphim, 2003; The Cabbage of Paradise, Seraphim, 2007; The Last Cluster, Pecan Grove Press, forthcoming), and during the 1990s served as writer-in-residence at Concordia College and Connecticut College in the U.S. His new project blends poetry and history. Morton has reviewed poetry for several publications but does not have a book of criticism in the work. Although of average height, Colin Morton sees eye to eye with his wife, Mary Lee Bragg, and looks up to his son, Dr. Jeff Morton.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book was published when I was 33. That meant that I could now look people in the eye when I said I was a writer, and it meant that I could set aside the poems I had been going over for years and move on to to new ways of writing.

2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I have lived in Ottawa for over 25 years. Geography does impact on my writing, insofar as it separates me from familiar places and familiar faces. I often return to the prairie landscape of my childhood, for writing material, both for its elemental qualities as landscape and because of my youthful associations. Debates on race and gender remind me that my own (male and pale) experience isn't "the norm" but one variety of a diverse reality. That diversity expresses itself within groups, though, as well as between groups. For example, I have lived with women all my life, and feel I have some understanding, but there are more different ways of being a woman than there are generic differences between them and men, as groups.

3 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

It all depends. A poem or story might begin with a single line or sentence swimming around in my head soaking up connotations and rhymes. As I grow older, I think or plan my work in larger pieces, or with thematic concerns and designs. For example, my current project focuses on a historical situation in the 1870s; my book Dance, Misery evolved under a thematic imperative - to write about "public passions."

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

For me, giving a public reading is a late part of the creative process. I like to keep my work under guard for a few weeks or months or years, and not to be too porous to well-meaning suggestions from others. But at a certain point, public response at a reading can tell me important things, even if it is only, "don't read this in public again."

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

The current questions are, by and large, the same questions as ever: where do we come from? who are we? where are we going? Although I don't think matters of literary theory or technique can answer those questions, they can help us ask them in ways we might not have done before. One theory behind my recent writing is expressed by the title of Robert Fulford's talks, "The Triumph of Narrative." I think people want and need stories, because stories help us sort out what is important to us in ways that rules, laws and commandments can't do. I am trying to write poetry that is a form of thinking. Yes, it is "head and heart running together"; I just want thinking to be as important as feeling, in my poetry.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

No. (Outside what?)

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

I guess it's a little easier. When I was younger, I often had big plans that never came to much. Now I am more patient, more sure of myself, more willing to stick with something that turns out to be difficult. It always does.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

This morning for breakfast. To make sure you get a ripe one, twist off the stem. If it comes out easily, it's ready to eat.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Today, it's a tie between:"Take it easy" (Bob Marley) and "Fail better" (Sam Beckett).

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I have written both from the beginning, and it is often difficult to know which form a new idea will take. There's the appeal of marrying form and content. While I believe that form follows content, I know that the form I choose to work in also steers or shapes what content I can get into a poem or story - even if both are on the same subject.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am a slow starter, so I tend to give myself all day to find the sweet spot when the writing gets done. Then I will keep at it, all day every day, until I'm exhausted or, more likely, reality gets in the way. When I am not writing is when the days begin to get "typical."

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

If I can't get to the ocean, and if I can't put it out of my mind that I've got to write something (says who?), I am most likely to find new impetus in reading: poetry, history, philosophy, fiction.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

If my most recent book is The Cabbage of Paradise: The Merzbook and other poems, then my answer is simple. This republication of two 1987 books brings together narrative, lyric and performance pieces that I was doing together with the cross-media group First Draft, but that were separated when the poems about Kurt Schwitters and my own concrete poems were published in different volumes. My forthcoming book The Local Cluster is my most thoroughly "environmental" book: it focuses on the local scene - neighborhoods, including the "earth household" - and it includes two haibun series that fuse prose and verse, however uneasily, in a single form.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Books do come from books, as Northrop Frye said long ago. I also sometimes let music lead my writing (as, more often, poets follow the verbal music in their heads).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I've had literary infatuations, from Keats and Shakespeare to Atwood and Newlove to Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, but today I think none of these are as important as the understanding that literature is a universe of knowledge. A mountain range doesn't include only the bits that stick up above the clouds.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

The one essential thing on my agenda that I haven't gotten to yet is death. I probably won't like it, but it's peculiarly satisfying to get to the point when I have no more urgent ambitions.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I don't like to contemplate the latter question; I don't think I could have been satisfied doing the things I probably would have done. Given my druthers, I'd probably still be in the arts, preferably the cooperative arts - theatre, film, radio - where you have something to show for your work at the end of the day.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

The feeling mentioned above, that I want to have something to show for my efforts. As a writer, I control the means of production, the working conditions, the design and quality standards; everything except the level of remuneration.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I just read Nadine McInnis's Two Hemispheres, which verges on greatness with its marriage of wildness and control, intensity and understanding. Just before that, I read Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, important, though not as great as his Freedom Evolves, or even as strong a defence of agnosticism as Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: a history. Among films, Sarah Polley's Away from Her is nearly great; the one most people seem to have missed, though, is Max.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I'm writing a poem sequence on one of Canada's earliest refugee crises and peace-keeping missions - to the newly claimed North-West territory in the 1870s. In large part, it is a character study of the leading figures, Sitting Bull, chief of some 5,000 Sioux and Cheyennes who fled the USA to escape persecution, and Mounted Police officer James Walsh, from Prescott near Ottawa. I'm surprised how many people I mention it to do not know the story, or how important it is to the shape of present-day Canada. In writing about it, of course I'm interested not only in "where we come from" but also "where we are going."

12 or 20 questions archive

Poetry on Film

Ottawa's novelists are out in force this fall, with book launches by (among others) Elizabeth Hay, Rita Donovan, John Metcalf, Phil Jenkins, and Frances Itani. At last week's launch for Frances Itani's Remembering the Bones, her editor advised the audience to look forward to Itani's last novel, Deafening, on movie screens in the future.
We are accustomed to seeing novels and short stories adapted to film, but how about poems? Audiences at last week's Ottawa International Animation Festival had a rare opportunity to hear and see poetry interpreted by filmmakers, in two programs of short films shown at the National Gallery of Canada. As curator Marcel Jean remarked, most poems tend to be very short, and the animated films made from them are usually one minute, two minutes, three minutes long. A chance for animators to show off their skills with a great deal of freedom, and a chance for the audience to luxuriate in the language and images, and perhaps to compare the images the words stimulate in their own minds with those presented on screen.
There were two programs of poetry animation: the first featuring filmmakers' interpretations of poems originally written to be read, whether silently or aloud; the second, a program of "poetry-films" that were made originally for film, or with film in mind. Thanks to the great variety of alternative activities available in Ottawa, I was able to attend only the first program, which kicked off with the film Primiti Too Taa, a film entirely made on an old wide-carriage Remington typewriter, in which the letters dance around the screen while someone (okay, it's me) recites part of the sound poem Ursonate, or sonata in primitive sounds, created nearly a century ago by the German artist Kurt Schwitters. This is a film I co-produced in 1986 with animator Ed Ackerman, and a measure of the little film's staying power is that another of the animators whose work was on the program told me that he has "always liked that film."
Also on the program are experimental films from Italy and the Netherlands, several animations from the National Film Board, a couple of Earle Birney pieces including his own performance of a sound poem, Lynn Smith's homey treatment of a Carl Sandburg piece read by the poet himself, a slick rendition of a Philip Larkin poem read by Sir Bob Geldof, and an equally slick version of Al Purdy's "At the Quinte Hotel, animated by Bruce Alcock.
There's an affinity between text and image, between poetry and film, that many artists are exploring. Audiences really respond, too, when they get the chance. Watch for it!

Lampman-Scott Award Reading

The Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry was founded in 1986. This year the estate of Duncan Campbell Scott put its weight and his name behind the award for poets living in the Nation's Capital in order to make a new combined award in both their names.



In life Lampman and Scott were friends, both prominent in Ottawa's poetry scene. They made a joint legacy which continues in this form. Interestingly enough the prize money is now more than either would have made in a year (not adjusted for inflation). The prize is now $1500 for Ottawa's poetry book of the year.

The Lampman-Scott Award Reading on September 20th featured most of this year’s nominees, which are:
• Sylvia Adams: Sleeping on the Moon (Hagios Press)
• Ronnie R. Brown: Night Echoes (Black Moss Press)
• Terry Ann Carter: Transplanted (Borealis Press)
• Michael Dennis: Arrows of Desire (General Store Publishing House)
• Oni The Haitian Sensation: Ghettostocracy (McGilligan Books)
• Christopher Levenson: Local Time (Stone Flower Press) [no sites]
• rob mclennan: aubade (Broken Jaw Press)
• rob mclennan: name, and errant (Stride Publications)
• Monty Reid: Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books)
• Grant D. Savage: Their White with Them (Bondi Studios) [no sites]

The preview of nominees had about 40 people attending in the comfortable surrounds, with wine and cheese and door prizes for several of the titles, won based on naming Ottawa Poets in the last Arc issue.

Most, if not all nominees, also had books present for sale. Christopher Levenson sent regrets for his absence and rob mclennan sent a proxy reader.

It was co-hosted by Anita Lahey, editor of Arc Magazine, and Steve Artelle, who spearheads historic walks thru literary history. He also advocated the creation of Poet's Pathway and Poet's Hill which was inaugurated in September 2006 at Beechwood Cemetery.

Artelle is shown here with Lahey and Brockwell

Beechwood Cemetery was the venue for this event, and is where both Lampman and Scott are buried. Artelle related how occasionally tributes to them appear on the graves. At one point coins were on Lampman's gravestone. At another point, an empty ice cream container, as a leftover from a private tribute party perhaps.

The energy at a cementary isn't always what one would expect, as proven by Oni's slam and sung poetry on shaving your bush for peace, after which Artelle quipped there's the whole shaved bush tradition running thru Lampman's work as well.

It was, not surprisingly, a night for impressive poetry, and across many styles and subjects. There was also an irregular refrain of that thoughtful gutteral sound when a poetic phrase strikes home, goosebumps and laughter.

Sylvia Adams opened the reading with poems from her book Sleeping on the Moon, a poetic narrative around the 1800s experiences of The story of Florence von Sass, a slave who becomes the wife of a British man. She describes the travels down to the detail, including the mosquitoes which bubbled up thick as blood. You can read more excepts of her book on her site.

Following that Grant Savage read from his book of Their White With Them, of haiku, senryu and short poems and got a little hum from

first snow
the cat followed everywhere
by its footprints

A ripple of chuckles went around the room with his (p. 21)

leaving the frontier
the borderguard's pen
in my pocket

Ronnie Brown was up next.

Ronnie Brown is a long time supporter and participant in Ottawa's poetry. She was also shortlisted for the Lampman award in 2001. Artelle said, "she's become a regular here -- careful Ronnie!"

Her Night Echoes follows in part the themes of loss, thru death and the distortion of lives caused by Alzheimer's taking a person gradually.

One poem is a tribute to Diana Brebner's daughter Ana who was struck by lightning out of the blue. Brown wrote of that teaspoon full of terror, doled out now and then like castor oil.

Monty Reid, 3 time nominee for the GG read from his Disappointment Island. Despite the impression the title may give, it has a rich, often comic vision, and is an uplifting book. He read some of my personal favorites, including Nisidoro. It is one of those poems that when I come across in a book makes me want to buy it instantly (but it would be silly to buy a book on the weight of one poem, wouldn't it). But other poems convinced me. Here's an excerpt, p. 60,

the lanterns themselves
cling to the wires with a passion known only
in disappointed stone

In Bonebed: Dinosaur Provincial Park there are rich phrases like these: Out of a scattered bone/reconstruct a herd and All those millions of years just leave us/ exhausted.

The fourth reader was Terry Ann Carter. She also has been a long time participant in Ottawa's scene. Artelle noted that she was one of the readers when he was doing the BARD reading series back in 1993 or 1994.

She read from Transplanted, a book which is also stemming from biography. A poem she read mused on the coming of age of Wilhelm Rontgen who discovered X-Rays and was awarded the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901. Was he shy of girls?

his serious mindfulness
falling out of fashion

with the ladies of Wurzburg.
Never claiming a prize

for best dressed --
never claiming a prize for wit.

Next up was Oni the Haitian Sensation who not only performed political poems for peace, but did her poetry mixing English, French and Spanish. She is an educator and threw a few tidbits our way, including the fact that Queen Victoria's grandmother was a black woman, Queen Charlotte.

She not only sang but got everyone on their feet to act out the gestures and shake their booties. (No photo of that I'm afraid.)

What a treat to hear her in French and Spanish as well. At least one person reported goosebumps from her French reading. in Yo Soy Oni Luciano she has a refrain of she bled, she bled, she bled that sounds remarkably like an instrument other than just voice.

Michael Dennis, recently mentioned here, followed this up reading from his book of erotic poems, Arrows of Desire, including a poetic response to Charles Simic's poem [search lower on that page] Eating Out the Angel of Death.

His poem on a husband distracting his wife on the phone while talked with her mom held the lines, fall to your knees where you begin that most sacred of prayers.

Watch for his (possible) poetry workshop coming to a venue near you.

To close, Lahey introduced the nominee with two titles shortlisted. The last the billet was rob mclennan, represented by proxy of Jennifer Mulligan. Rob mclennan, she said, is currently working out west, an appropriately vague description that rob himself might use.

Mulligan read outstandingly from two of his nominated titles. Continuing through with the theme started by Oni and Dennis, she read an excerpt of his poems from the ongoing collaboration of the poems around Sex at 31,

knows enough
when good is good
as it gets. is good

or even great. makes love
& pushes, envelopes in spades.

She also read from the series in aubade that begin with an epigraph as titles and starting points, you are lost in your own prologue - Robert Kroetsch which reads in part,

every step into a poem
is a new beginning, is there ever

a middle. this is a middle

From the one book, name , an errant in the poem seemly, a series come those observations that are humorous such as, even discount stores have their distinguished mark-up. The small ahs of hearing poetry pattered thru the poems from both of books nominated.

The award winner will be announced on October 13th in a ceremony that will be part of the Ottawa International Writer's Festival.

The reading closed with the book draw and thank yous to the staff who hosted the reading. There are a few other photos of those in attendance.

a note from dusty owl: Alootook Ipellie

It is with great sadness that I write to inform you that Ottawa-based writer and artist Alootook Ipellie passed away this pass week.

For those that did not have the opportunity to meet him, the following is taken from an article written by Michael P. J. Kennedy:

Alootook Ipellie, born in 1951, Canadian Inuit author, editor, artist, and cartoonist, whose Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993) was the first published collection of short stories by an Inuit writer. Inuit life in the Arctic region of Canada changed significantly during the 20th century. The traditional Inuit nomadic life, based on hunting and fishing, was largely replaced by life in settlements that more closely resembled those of southern Canada. Ipellie's life and creative work vividly reflect this period of change among the Inuit of Canada.

Ipellie was born at a hunting camp on Baffin Island in what is now Nunavut, Canada. Although he and his family continued to be involved with some seasonal hunting, the family spent most of its time in the town of Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit), Nunavut's largest community. His early education was in Iqaluit, but because there was no high school in the community, he had to leave for further education in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and later in Ottawa, Ontario. At Ottawa's High School of Commerce, Ipellie first developed his drawing skills.

Ipellie settled in Ottawa, but he continued to create work for and about the Inuit in the north. In the early 1970s he did translations between English and the Inuit language of Inuktitut, worked as a journalist, and drew cartoons for Inuit Monthly (later renamed Inuit Today) magazine. Ipellie served as editor of Inuit Today from 1979 to 1982. In the 1970s his ongoing cartoon strip Ice Box in Inuit Today provided a humorous, critical view of life for Inuit in the changing north. A later strip, Nuna and Vut, which appeared in Iqaluit's Nunatsiaq News in the 1990s, continued his satiric look at a life of transition in the Arctic. His pen-and-ink drawings have been featured at exhibitions in Canada, Norway, and Greenland.

Ipellie's nonfiction writing, such as his series of articles, Those Were the Days, in Inuit Monthly (1974-1976), depicts how the lifestyle, religion, politics, language, and culture of the south have affected the Inuit way of life. His poetry, such as Take Me to Your Leader (1980) and Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border (1992), also illustrates his attention to the effects of change on Inuit life.

Ipellie has become best known as a writer of short fiction. His stories, like his poems, have appeared in many literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. One of his early stories, Nipikti the Old Man Carver (1976), is a gentle reflection by an old man on how things used to be in simpler times in the north. With the publication of his collection Arctic Dreams and Nightmares in 1993, Ipellie's work became more controversial, as he used magical plot situations to combine traditional Inuit myths and legends with contemporary people and events from outside the Arctic. This collection pairs Ipellie's stories with his ink drawings. In stories such as "When God Sings the Blues," "After Brigitte Bardot," and "Summit with Sedna," Ipellie imaginatively illustrates how Inuit tradition has survived despite the influence of southern culture.

Signs of Fall

As summer ends, Ottawa’s literary scene gears up with even more than the usual number of activities planned. Inevitably, there are scheduling clashes, with two or more poetry events going on at the same time. The last day of summer, September 20, is one such occasion, when you have to choose between a joint reading by the contenders for Ottawa’s major annual poetry prize, the Lampman-Scott Award, and the launch of an early front-runner for next year’s Lampman-Scott prize, Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres, from Brick Books.
If you find yourself on foot in the shadow of the Peace Tower that Thursday evening, your choice is easy, because you are a short walk from the luxuriously appointed Nicholas Hoare Bookstore, 419 Sussex Drive, where Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres is being launched. The store is carpeted and lined with books, so a microphone will be needed for the listeners, who will no doubt outnumber the chairs, however comfortable many of them may be. Look for a short reading, then, and a sociable wait for the author to sign your copy – a must if you have fallen under the spell of McInnis’s poetry. Like the poems in Two Hemispheres, McInnis’s reading style is intense, emotional, at once elemental and personally vulnerable. Her new collection weaves together meditations about the lives of inmates of a women’s mental hospital photographed in the 19th century with accounts of the poet’s father’s secretive descent into mental illness. The poetry is rhythmic, sometimes incantatory, exposing raw emotion without veering into sentimentality, and the book is under twenty dollars. The hors d’oeuvres, this close to the Byward Market, are probably pretty good too.
Across town at the Lampman-Scott reading, the seating is adequate, luxurious in fact, at the reception centre of Beechwood Cemetery, off Beechwood Drive, a little beyond the Governor-General’s residence. OCTranspo buses serve the location, and there is convenient parking, but the group reading won’t attract anyone happening to walk past. It’s a pity if the reading doesn’t draw a large audience, too, because it brings together as many as possible of Ottawa’s poets who have brought out a book in the past year. Listeners may sample, in comfort, the whole range of styles and levels of achievement among the city’s poets, young, old and in-between. At the September 20th reading, for example, the readers might range from that ubiquitous chronicler of the mundane, rob mclennan (who knows?) to that meticulous archivist of the nightmarish, Ronnie Brown; from miniaturist Grant Savage to activist Oni the Haitian Sensation. If the Lampman-Scott competition were like a poetry slam, the poets I’d expect the final rounds would see the veteran, GG-nominated archaeologist of the zeitgeist Monty Reid (Disappointment Island, Chaudiere Books, Ottawa) sparring with a couple of “rookies”: the well-seasoned “first book” by Sylvia Adams, Sleeping on the Moon (Hagios Press, Regina), an explorer’s journal brought back from 19th-century Africa; and the snapping-fresh Hung Out to Dry in Cape Breton (Signal Editions/Véhicule) by first-time author, long-time editor Anita Lahey. With exciting new books of poetry like these coming out by the handful, who cares who takes the prize? The audience is already the winner.

12 or 20 questions: with John-James Ford

John-James Ford (photo by Charles Earl) was born in Kindersley, Saskatchewan. He studied at the Royal Military College and the University of New Brunswick. John is a Canadian Foreign Service Officer currently posted to Colombo with his wife, Karie, and his children, Jackson and Samia. Bonk on the Head, which was co-winner of the 2006 Ottawa Book Award for fiction, is his major work, and he has recently completed a long poem picaresque entitled Epiphany Season. He was recently awarded a grant scholarship to attend the 2007 Banff Writing Studio, and is presently finishing The Air Inside Us, his second novel. His short fiction and poetry have been published in qwerty, Carousel, Grey Borders, Other Voices, papertiger, stonestone, Yalla, Prairie Fire, SUB-Terrain, and Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Chaudiere Books).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It made certain members of my family not talk to me for months because they thought I was writing lies about them. This was my first introduction to the perils of entering the public domain, and how some see certain elements of life accurately portrayed in a story as proof that I must be writing thinly-veiled memoirs. After Bonk on the Head was published and I was travelling across the country in an old VWFox, doing readings to a couple or three people in every city, I had a few soldiers, some of them friends, approach me (the novel is mostly set at Royal Military College, where I studied my undergrad). They would say things like "Dude, I can't believe you took a shit on the Commandant's lawn, that's disgusting!" Otherwise the novel lent a sense of legitimacy to my writing, at least in my own head. I think writers, as a rule, are sensitive beasts, and finally getting that first book professionally bound, especially when browsing a bookstore and coming across it, is a very emotional and gratifying experience. Yes, it has a lot to do with ego, but so what? There are worse things to be driven to do than to manipulate the symbols of the alphabet in such a way that the final product will open the curtains in a new way for another human. It's nice to have someone interested in what you have to say, even if they are asking for a free copy (which many people seem to do).

2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I've lived in Ottawa most of my life. My dad was RCMP so we moved around a bit when I was a kid but eventually settled in Ottawa, so this is my de facto hometown even though I was born in the prairies. Geography is very important to me, I like my characters to live in a definite place, with concrete landmarks that the both the reader and I can relate to. I have noticed though that I don't usually use a specific place until I'm far away from it, writing somewhere else. For instance I'm presently living in Sri Lanka, and have a story bubbling to the surface that will be set here, but I know that I won't startwriting it until we leave this place about a year from now. I'm not sure why.

3 - Where does a piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I have active files on different subjects, little folders with insights I have had and collected over the years. (I have recently learned that while insights are powerful and exciting, most of them end up being wrong). When a story comes I never know where it comes from or how long it will be, but I can always tell when a new project has arrived. I then use various old pieces, or insights, as a sort of road map to find my way through the story. It's never the same process twice, though.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

I don't mind them so much now, but they are in no way connected to my creative process. I hated them when I was in grad school or on my book tour. Generally, I prefer to curl up in a cool, quiet room with a book and a blanket and enjoy it alone, so when I'm reading my own stuff, I tend to assume everyone else feels the same way. But since having children, I have found a genuine joy in reading to others, so much so that I want to write children's stories now.

5 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential. At a certain point editing seems to get tedious and it's possible to become blinded by the manuscript. I, at least, need an editing hand that I can trust. I had a very positive experience with my editor, and learned more about writing from him than anybody else. He was also my publisher, so he didn't pull any punches because at the end of the day it was his dime.

6 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

I'm not sure if this is a skill testing question or if you are just high. Is this a koan? My official answer: "The voice of my flute intones through the orchard."

7 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

It's a three-way tie: Tell the truth (my Dad) Tell the hardest truth first (Hemingway, I think) and Be happy (Buddha). (No, it's not trite to say that!)

8 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I don't really write non-fiction. I can't see it happening anytime soon, but you never know. I haven't written much new poetry in a few years and have been sort of hoping it will come back.

9 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

04:00-05:00 meditation, 5:00-6:00 writing, 6:00-6:45 yoga. Then I have breakfast, with the kids if possible, before work. At night I'm generally too bagged to write so that's when I read. My partner Karie gives me much lattitude on the weekends, especially when I have momentum and am finishing a project.

10 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I'll start editing what I've already written to get into the groove. I always listen to music when I write. If I feel really stuck I'll take a journal and go to a public place.

11 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

People, especially those I have relationships with. And rock music.

12 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Sit with S.N. Goenka.

13 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, I'm a full-time civil servant, in the Foreign Service. If I wasn't a writer this would be my dream job so I guess I have no complaints.

14 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

When I was young I realized that I could do it effectively, and I enjoyed it, and I knew the overhead was low, I just needed paper and a pen. Secretly I used to want to be a rock star, but I don't think that's very unique. My first girlfriend told me my poems were beautiful, and I never looked back. Later I realized she was lying, or had bad taste, but it gave me a start. I don't think I'd be writing today if nobody I cared about had ever encouraged me.

15 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Last great book is the one I'm reading right now: Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. It is beautifully written. Incredibly tender. What's a great film? We don't have TV but I'm a Hollywood junkie, for better or worse, and the Bourne Ultimatum was a very entertaining movie.

16 - What are you currently working on?

I'm just finishing my new novel, The Air Inside Us.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Stephen Brockwell

Stephen Brockwell (photo taken in Cardiff, Wales by rob mclennan) lives, writes and works in Ottawa and other places. His third book, Fruitfly Geographic (Toronto: ECW Press, 2004) won the Archibald Lampman Award. The Real Made Up (Toronto: ECW Press) will be published in September. Brockwell will read from the book in Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Montreal this fall and winter.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I can't say that The Wire in Fences changed my life. There was an earthquake the night of the launch, about 4.5 on the Richter scale. A friend proved he could descend a flight of stairs in two steps to save his life. But I don't think my book had much to do with the earthquake. I loved having a book in my hand. I enjoyed reading from it here and there. Not a life changing event, though.

2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I lived in Ottawa half-heartedly between 1987 and, say, 1999. I've been living here whole-heartedly since. I think breaking ground for an extension to your house, planting trees and building a deck help to make you part of a place, which is more important than choosing to reside in a place.

Geography is a big field, eh? I don't think it's possible for a writer to escape the influence of geography: it shapes our economy and culture. Geography is the surface time and history move on. The Canadian winter seems to me a giant factor in our writing. The vast emptiness, the cities dotted along the border. The rivers. Think of Newlove's "Driving."

Race and gender are big, complex issues, eh? The Real Made Up dips its toe in those waters. If nothing else, postmodernism is the era of the question. People are asking questions about how the macroscopic economic and cultural systems maintain themselves by rules that had always been taken for granted. The delusions of fundamentalists (christian, islamist, keynesian) notwithstanding, many people now refuse to accept these rules as given. Good. I write poems that are informed by these ideas, but I don't have articulate or informed opinions.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Jeepers. You'd have to ask my hypothalamus and survey a handful of neurons. Poems begin in order and end in chaos. Poems refuse to accept the idea that engendered them. A poem is "the cry of its occasion" (Stevens). The work on a book is, for me, always a background activity. Plan, abandon, re-plan. Fill a notebook. And then write something tangential as the motivation or the impulse leads. It's important for me to be excruciatingly patient when working on longer pieces. The point is not write the poetic equivalent of an idea - that seems to me the antithesis of poetry. I try to enter into an idea, explore it, read about it, read poems by others about it. Once that foundation and framing have constructed themselves, a poem can lay itself down.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

I test drive nearly everything by reading it at an open mic. A poem is made out of sound - it would seem odd to write a poem without feeling it in your mouth. If it doesn't taste good, hork it into the spittoon, I say. And of course it's important to hear work by others. Poetry has been recited, heard, sung and performed since it was first uttered. I find it pleasing to hear the music of other poets' phrases, the swing of their sentences, their attack (in a musical sense) on the line.

5 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

That's a good question. It really depends on the book. My first and most recent books benefited enormously from work with an editor. My second and third books didn't call for as much interaction. I don't find it difficult at all. It can be an essential part of discovering the nature of the work, under optimal circumstances. Let me digress for a sec. I don't believe in certainty. The day I write a poem that I think is finished, please shoot me on the spot. The very idea of completion in poetry makes me queasy. Whose notion of completion? Is it a perfected object? What aesthetic, idiomatic, ideological, formal criteria is a reader going to use to compare your little blab of words with a perfect grid? I prefer the collaborative cultivation of poetry to the solipsistic prophesying of poetry. But, hey, depending on what you believe, even Moses wrote what he was told to write. That whole come-down-from-the-mountain thing was an exercise in legitimation.

6 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

I find the process smooth if you're working with a decent publisher. I've been lucky enough to work with Michael Holmes and the crew at ECW for my last three books. They're hardworking, diligent and genuinely helpful. Book-writing is another matter; that becomes more and more difficult.

7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

A few weeks ago. I have kids, so we eat a lot of pears. My daughter likes the canned Delmonte variety but we refuse to buy the ones with 'syrup'. We squeezed up home made lemonade and limeade this summer. So much for that.

8 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

In conversation, in technology and the arts, you are generally impersonating someone. I find the advice that the managers of J. L. Gotrocks' business empire gave to Fred Flinstone genuinely profound. When forced to impersonate Gotrocks, Fred had a three line script to repeat to other tycoons: 1) "Who's baby is that?" 2) "What's your angle?" 3) "I'll buy that."

My father told me never to take the easy way out of anything, but I'm no longer sure that's sage advice. Anyway, I think he really meant always take the hardest possible path to everything.

I hesitate to say it but Michael Harris gave me good advice when I was starting out: editors and reviewers will accept or reject your poems for reasons that may have very little to do with the merits of your work; acceptance doesn't mean a poem has value; rejection doesn't mean a poem is worthless.

Peter van Toorn told me to wait for "the long wave," a surfing analogy, no doubt, for not scratching down every poem the wind stirs up.

Finally, I admire Keats' empathy: “if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince (sic) and pick about the Gravel.”

9 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I can't write non-fiction to save my life. I recently ghost-wrote an article about an information system for a power company in Ohio. There wasn't a memorable sentence in 2000 words. Which seemed to please the client since the facts were straight and the article made them look good.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I refuse routine. A typical day begins with a barking dog, urination and a cup of coffee.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My writing is perpetually stalled. I regularly pour a quart of Homer's Epic 10W40 into my ears.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I think that's a question for other people to answer. I will say that The Real Made Up makes me more uncomfortable than any previous book.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Well, if David said what you said he said, he's very sharp, no? There's little need for "other" is there? Most of the things you describe find their way into books. Recently, I've been fascinated by physiology and neurology (which I read about in books). Mathematics has become less and less important for me as a way of approaching poetry. There are a few cryptic allusions in The Real Made Up to the speed of light. Other than poetry, fiction and criticism, I'd have to say that history and politics have caught my attention. Given our deplorable, undemocratic, secretive and obscene domestic political climate, how could they not?

14 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Feel perfectly relaxed for 24 hours. I don't care by what means. Someone would have to tell me, "Mr. Brockwell, you have now experienced 24 hours of complete relaxation," because I don't think I would recognize it.

15 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?

I'm not sure what you mean. My occupation is something like "information technology consultant." Many poets have said that writing as an occupation is a disaster for the poetry. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. WC Williams was a paediatrician. F. R. Scott was a constitutional lawyer. I could not write for a living. I'd be afraid of it. I would seriously consider running a restaurant or building green homes for a living.

16 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I've written since I was twelve, I think. Blame "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" and Lampman's "November". And 70s progressive rock bands. But I do do somethings else: write java, tweak databases, plan marketing campaigns, draft technical white papers - gawd awful stuff.

17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Illiad is a great book - I listen to that on my mp3 player every few days. I think that The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is a great book. Erin Moure's O Cadoiro. Mark Strand's Man and Camel. Stuart Ross's I Cut My Finger may be the last really enjoyable book I've read. The last great film I watched? The independent Aussie film Little Fish probably.

18 - What are you currently working on?

Three very different things. A book length essay on poetry, geography and thinking. A book of poems about energy. A long poem about an English naval officer imprisoned in the citadel at Quebec before the Treaty of Paris. And a handful of poems that have foisted themselves onto my life.

12 or 20 questions archive